NAME: REXFORD CUDJOE MENSAHID NUMBER: MAW0101811351COURSE: MBAC 709: ORGANIATIONAL BEHAVIOUR’Personality’ is a nature-versus-nurture (that is heredity versus environment) issue.
Discuss all the relevant determinants with instances.PERSONALITY- The sum total of ways in which an individual reacts and interacts with others. The debate on personality research centered on whether an individual’s personality was the result of heredity or of environment.
That is, was personality primarily determined at birth, or was it the result of the individual’s interaction with his or her environments? Undeniable there is no simple Black-and – White answer. Personality appears to be a result of both hereditary and environmental factorsHeredity refers to those factors that were determined at conception. Physical stature, facial attractiveness, gender, temperament, muscle composition and reflexes, energy level, and biological rhythms are characteristics that are generally considered to be either completely or substantially influenced by who your parents are, that is by their biological, physiological, and inherent psychological makeup. The heredity approach argues that the ultimate explanation of an individual’s personality is the molecular structure of the genes, located in the chromosomes.
A stream of conducted research has provided credible facts to the argument that heredity plays an important part in determining an individual’s personality. One research looks at the genetics underpinnings of human behaviour and temperament among young children. The second considered the study of twins who were separated at birth, a study conducted by Dr. Nancy Segal a coordinator of the University of Minnesota research project. The third examine the consistency in job satisfaction over time and across situations.Studies of young children lend strong support to the power of heredity. Evidence demonstrates that traits such as fear, aggressiveness and shyness can be traced to inherited genetic characteristics.
These findings suggest that some personality traits may be built into the same genetic code that affects factors such as height and hair colour.Researchers have studied more than hundred sets of identical twins who were separated at birth and raised separately. If heredity played little or no role in determining personality, you would expect to find few similarities between the separated twins. But Dr. Nancy Sagal and his research team over thirty one year’s study of identical twins reared apart concluded that heredity plays an important role in determining personality.
The researchers discovered that the set of twins studied shared more personality characteristics than siblings raised in the same family. For almost every behaviour trait, a significant part of the variation between the twins turned out to be associated with genetic factors. For instance, one set of twins who had been separated for thirty nine years and raised forty five miles apart were found to drive the same model and colour car, chain-smoked the same brand of cigarette, owned dogs with the same name, and regularly vacationed within three blocks of each other in a beach community one thousand, five hundred miles away. Researchers have found that genetics accounts for about fifty per cent of the personality differences and more than thirty per cent of variation in occupational and leisure interests.Interestingly, the twin studies have suggested that the parental environment doesn’t add much to our personality development. In other words, the personalities of identical twins raised in different households are more similar to each other than the personalities of the separated twins to the siblings they were actually raised with. Ironically, the most important contribution our parents may have made to our personalities is giving us their genes!Further support for the importance of heredity can be found in studies of individual job satisfaction.
Individual job satisfaction is found to be relatively stable over time. This result is consistent with what you would expect if satisfaction is determined by something inherent in the person rather than by external environmental factors. In fact, research has shown that identical twins reared apart have similar job satisfaction levels, even if their jobs are completely different
